This is the somewhat lengthily named Technics SL-1000RE-S Direct Drive Turntable, or Technics SL-1000RE-S for short. It’s one of the most advanced direct drive turntables on the market, and as you’ve probably guessed, it’s priced accordingly.
Technics And The Direct Drive System
The Technics brand was founded in 1965 to produce high-end audio equipment, like turntables, amplifiers, and speakers. The company later became famous for their SL-1200 DJ turntable which became a global industry standard.
Technics rose to prominence when they launched the Technics SL-1100, a direct drive turntable directed at the consumer market. Technics was owned by Matsushita (now known as Panasonic) and it was Matsushita engineer Shuichi Obata who had invented the direct drive turntable, revolutionizing the industry.
Those grey circles around the perimeter of the heavy-weight brass turntable are designed to eliminate unwanted vibration. The turntable weighs a total of 7.9 kilograms.
Prior to this time belt driven platters were the standard for turntables, direct drive offered a slew of benefits including reduced vibration and increased sound quality.
An unexpected benefit was that it made it possible to “scratch,” a skill developed by DJs who put their hand on the record and move certain parts of the track back and forward under the stylus to create various distinctive sounds.
This DJ movement began in earnest in the 1970s, and the turntable went from being merely a music player to being a musical instrument and a critical part of the explosively popular DJ scene.
The Technics Direct Drive Turntable System SL-1000RE-S
There’s no easy way to say this, as beautiful as this turntable is it costs $18,999.99 USD. As a result, there’s no way the vast majority of us are going to own or even hear one in person.
The control unit, shown here on the left, can be used to adjust rotation speed down to two decimal places, offering extremely precise rotation speeds.
Those who can afford the eye-watering MSRP will be rewarded with what the team at Technics call “highly vivid sounds.”
Those of us constrained to more blue collar budgets aren’t entirely out of luck however, we can still buy the Technics 1200MK7 turntable, though with a price of $999.99 USD it does cost almost as much as a full tank of gas.
The Technics SL-1000RE-S comes with a slew of advanced features including a high-sensitivity tone arm, a double coil twin rotor-type coreless direct drive motor with heavyweight-class platter, the turntable platter has 12 tungsten weights for vibration damping, and the control unit is separated from the main unit to suppress the effects of unwanted noise.
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Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
